The True Detective Finale Recap: One More Light in the Darkness

Did you catch it? Last week I anticipated that the last episode might contain the very first shot of the Episode 1, in which a man appeared to carry another through the brush to escape a raging fire on the bayou. True to form, True Detective came full circle in "Form and Void," ending with that shot: Marty carrying Rust as they walked together into one last midnight. As for the fire, that was indeed the torching of Reverend Theriot’s church, which happened prior to 1995. So the first shot of the series was both symbolic of the whole show’s arc—Rust and Marty carrying each other across the damage of the past—and another example of the past and present unfolding simultaneously. It’s beautiful, in a way.

But let’s circle back one last time to the beginning of Episode 8, the one in which everything is solved. Well, not quite everything. We’ll get there. The show opens with one of the more unsettling life-of-a-serial-killer sequences I’ve ever seen on TV or film. The camera moves through a thick swamp to a location that looks, at first, not unlike Reginald Ledoux’s compound. (Remember those first shots they showed us of Ledoux’s compound, ending with him in the gas mask? We never saw that exact shot again, but that’s because it was a fake-out. Ledoux wasn’t the real monster in the story, just another man in the mask. Now we see the real monster.) Inside a foreboding shed is the tall man with the scars on his face, now confirmed without a shadow of a doubt to be the Tuttle family groundskeeper, seen both in 1995 and the present on his lawnmower. Viewers who first suspected this guy over Maggie’s dad (a red herring after all), I tip my hat to you.

As screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto points out in HBO’s Inside the Episode, this is the first time in the whole series that the perspective has shifted away from Marty and Rust, which makes it even more uncomfortable. First we see the scarred man, Childress, towering over an unidentified figure, in a shed covered with Yellow King-themed graffiti: an ever-so-slight echo of Rust’s storage space. Childress smirks about all the flies and promises to bring "Daddy" some water later. Then he walks out into the sun, whistling a tune I wish I could identify, and goes to his actual house: an overgrown, once-grand plantation. Judging from the dialogue we’re about to hear, this once may have been a working sugar cane planation, and if so, those creepy shacks are slave cabins. The family’s history of oppression and exploitation is very much alive.

Childress enters the grotesque home, a hoarder’s den of broken dolls, towering papers, crumbling taxidermy and stopped clocks. North by Northwest is playing on a television, and we hear Cary Grant’s cheeky line: "Not that I mind a slight case of abduction, but I have tickets to the theatre this evening." In the film, Grant’s character has just been kidnapped, but in the world of True Detective, the line takes on new meaning: It becomes a parody of law enforcement and government’s indifferent attitude towards the missing women and children who became Childress’s victims. Childress gleefully adapts a Cary Grant accent as he greets the home’s other resident: a woman, Betty, whose demeanor is slow and childlike. She pouts and demands his attention, as he babbles about his "very important work."

"It’s been weeks since I left my mark. Would that they had eyes to see," says Childress, and later: "My ascension removes me from the disk and the loop. I’m near the final stage."

Betty complains that Childress hasn’t "made flowers" on her for at least three weeks, which is the creepiest double entendre I have ever heard. In response, he puts her on his lap and molests her, asking to hear a story about "Grandpa." So in case it wasn’t clear that there was something unnatural and incestuous going on, there it is.

"I was in the cane fields, and he caught me when I was alone. And the dirt was warm. I felt the dirt warm on my back," Betty recalls, mid-finger bang. So their grandfather raped her as a child. Was that grandfather Sam Tuttle?

Now back to our regularly scheduled program, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. Rust and Cohle are still holding Geraci at gunpoint in the boat, where they force him to watch the videotape that Rust found in Tuttle’s home. (I’m assuming they brought the VCR with them?) He screams in horror, just like Marty did. And he seems genuinely shocked to see his missing person, Marie Fontenot, performing in some ghastly pagan child-rape-and-murder ritual. (The specifics of what they do on that tape are a mystery, but it’s not a stretch to think that Marie ended up like Dora Lange.) Rust demands to know why Geraci noted the missing-child report as "made in error." Geraci says it was his boss, then-sheriff Ted Childress, who wrote that, and he didn’t think to question it.

"I just follow what the big man says. It’s how this all works. I tried to get back with the mother. I tried to get back with her. She was gone. The file was gone... Nobody ever gave me a reason to second-guess it," Geraci sputters. "It’s chain of command. Right?"

Exactly. The chain of command, the refusal to question authority (especially when you’re getting rewards from them, as Geraci got his promotion from Ted Childress), is what has enabled this decades-long crime.

There’s a brief cut to the younger Childress painting a Catholic-school building yellow, and staring at a child. Then back to the dock, where Rust confiscates Geraci’s phone and wallet, and explains why Steve shouldn’t "swing some dick on this" and go after Marty and Rust. Cohle says that there are copies of the tape and all the evidence waiting to be mailed to law enforcement, government agencies and media outlets, should either of them get arrested, killed, or disappeared. "You just think about that little girl, Steve," Rust tells him—and yet, Geraci can’t see the bigger picture here. Rather than thinking about justice for Marie Fontenot, he sees himself as the victim for having to watch her killing. As Geraci continues to make veiled threats, Rust informs him that there’s a sniper who’s already been paid to kill him, should the need arise. Geraci decides he’s bluffing, which is when Cohle gives the signal, and a sniper riddles Steve’s car with bullets. And Cohle utters one of his best lines of the series: "I strike you as more of a talker or a doer, Steve?" They leave Geraci yelling about his car (which he actually obtained by confiscating it from a criminal), as we clearly see the sniper: the bar owner, whose own missing son was likely a Childress victim.

Back at Hart’s office, they’re trying to map out Tuttle’s sprawling and ambiguous family tree. As I’ve said, trees are always ominous on True Detective—family trees included. We know from their interview with Sam Tuttle’s "domestic" that he had children from many women, because he only liked to have sex with virgins. And many of those children, it seems, are undocumented. It’s here that Hart fixates on a detail of the case that has been overlooked: the "spaghetti man"’s green ears. On a hunch, he looks at canvassing photos from the Dora Lange case in 1995, and finds a house freshly painted green. He concludes that the attempted child kidnapper painted the house, and his ears were green because they were sticking out of his hat. Even Rust acknowledges that Marty has finally out-Sherlocked him. "Fuck you, man," he mutters in respect.

This takes us to a car scene, a counterpart to that first car conversation between Marty and Rust in Episode 1. Instead of abstractly articulating their philosophies, they’re now talking concretely about what has passed in their lives. Specifically, Rust sleeping with Maggie in 2002, and the falling-out that resulted.

"Everybody’s got a choice, Marty," Rust says, by way of explaining his side. "Shit, I sure blamed you, for pushing a good woman to the point where she had to use me, use our partnership to get rid of you. For just being a lying sack of shit."

It’s their most honest conversation to date, though there’s still a gap between them that will never be bridged: After Cohle goes on a tear about how humans are just "sentient meat" unless they make value judgements, Hart pauses and asks him, "What’s scented meat?" The detectives arrive at the green-painted house and track the former owner to a retirement home, where they quiz her about the painter. She recalls that the men "worked for the parish," came by while her husband was "offshore for city services" (another absentee father), charged $250—and one of them had a scarred face.

Of all things, it’s that memory of $250 that cracks the case. I love this All the President’s Men stuff, just Rust and Marty hunched in front of a computer, finding that a tax write-off for the paint job, tracing it to an expired business license for Billy Childress’s maintenance company, learning via the state property records that they mostly worked along the coast, for government properties and churches. The business was named Childress and Son, but oddly, the records don’t show Billy Childress having a son. They do, however, find that Billy’s mother was Elizabeth Childress, who (though they don’t explicitly mention it) is on their family tree as a possible mistress of Sam Tuttle. Through an old drivers’ license, Hart finds Billy Childress’s address: the hoarder-incest plantation.

With the end in sight, Hart and Cohle take precautions—something they certainly didn’t bother to do when they went after Ledoux in 1995. Cohle lays out his evidence packets for his sniper pal to mail if he doesn’t hear from Rust in 24 hours. Hart calls up Papania for a private meeting. The investigator is still convinced that Cohle is a sociopath and somehow responsible for the Lake Charles murder, but when Marty lays down the gauntlet—"We get something, you want the call, or do you want it to go to someone else?"—Papania immediately answers, "Give it to me."

And here we are, one last ride into the jungle. Cohle is having one of his synesthetic "visions": "That taste: aluminum, ash. I’ve tasted it before." The "before" was the first time they were in Erath in 1995. (His line from Episode 1: "I get a bad taste in my mouth out here. Aluminum, ash. Like you can smell the psychosphere.") Cohle explains to Rust that he still sees things, though his visions haven’t manifested onscreen in the show’s present-day scenes. That’s about to change.

They arrive, and immediately upon getting out of the car, Rust tells Marty to call Papania. "This is the place," he says with certainty. Many of the events that unfold now in direct contrast to their Ledoux raid, and this is one of them: Back in 1995, both men suggested calling the police and neither did it. This time, Hart rings the doorbell to ask for the phone. Betty answers and talks in childlike riddles. When Hart asks about Billy Childress, she calls him "Old Bill" and says he’s "in his house." As for the man who lives with Betty, she doesn’t give him a name, but describes him as "All around us, before you were born, and after you die." That’s when Marty busts through the door.

Rust is the first to see Childress, a few dozen feet away, his dead dog between them. Rust points a gun at him and demands him to freeze. Childress says "no" and runs.

Meanwhile, Hart is in the house, looking for Betty and a working phone. The camera tracks Hart past the headless dolls and debris, in the same way it’s followed the detectives through countless dark labyrinths over these eight episodes: the projects, the biker bar, the girls’ school, the Ledoux compound. He finds Betty playing hide-and-seek in a filth-covered bathroom, and he points a gun to her head, demanding the phone. Again, a contrast to 1995: this time, Marty holds his fire.

A word about Betty, since we don’t see her again (except briefly, when the police arrive). The nature of the Childresses’ and Tuttles’ crime is stealing the innocence of children and exploiting the weakness of those without power. In some ways, Betty is the ultimate damaged child: clearly mentally handicapped, sexually abused by her family from a young age, left to her own devices for an entire lifetime in this awful house, playing with broken dolls. She is everything this family has worked so hard to hide from the world.

And one of the men who hath wrought this is their father Ted Childress, whom Marty finds in the graffiti-covered shack. The damage that fathers do is a recurring theme in the show, but this son has had his revenge: Ted is chained to a bed frame, gaunt and barely living, his mouth sewn shut. Very Se7en.

Marty follows Cohle’s voice deeper into the jungle, but he’s behind—too far behind. (This is the point at which I became convinced that only Marty would survive.) Rust is following Childress’s voice, which urges him into the show’s final and most literal labyrinth: Carcosa. It is a crazy-looking structure, an abandoned fortress in the swamp. Rust descends beneath one of the arches, and finds himself literally entangled in those devil’s-nest sculptures that have haunted him for seventeen years. The stick sculptures in Carcosa are larger than a man, and instead of little bits of cloth and string woven into them, they appear to contain mummified victims.

"You know what they did to me? What I will do to all the sons and daughters of man," Childress’s booming voice tells Cohle. "You blessed Reggie, Dewall. Acolytes. Witnesses to my journey. Lovers. I am not ashamed. Come die with me, little priest."

Marty has taken a different route, where he passes a giant pile of discarded children’s clothes, like something out of the Holocaust Museum. Rust doesn’t answer his calls. This is terrifying.

Finally, Cohle has reached the heart of the labyrinth: a large, domed room. Could be some kind of silo, or possibly a pigeonnier, once used to house birds. Now it’s a temple to the Yellow King, who appears to be portrayed in an altar of human and deer bones, draped in yellow fabric. Through the hole at the top of the dome, Cohle sees a spiraling, dark storm. He’s watching in amazement when Childress sneaks up and stabs him in the gut, telling him, "Take off your mask." Rust uses his messed-up head in his own defense, literally bashing it against Childress again and again. Shots ring out: Marty approaching with his gun. Childress throws his a, where it lodges in Marty’s heart. As Childress stomps on Marty’s body, his own head gets blown off: Rust has used the last of his strength to fire.

Marty holds Rust as he pulls the knife out of his gut. Sirens. Papania and Gilbough arrive, and set off a flare, which Marty sees through the hole in the dome. It looks like a shooting star.

It’s not over yet. Next, Papania and Gilbough are visiting Hart in the hospital, explaining that they were able to make some arrests, and to match knife casts and prints with the Dora Lange and Lake Charles cases. Maggie and the girls arrive to pay Marty a visit, and his daughters finally see the vulnerable father they needed, as he bursts into tears. Unlikely as it is, this is a new beginning for Marty and his family.

And now there’s Rust, who has awakened from a post-surgery coma, and is in much worse shape than Marty. He looks like a Jesus figure now: long hair falling to his shoulders, white robe, that wound in his side—all he needs is stigmata. When Marty comes to visit Rust’s room, they start bickering like an old married couple, until Rust reveals what’s bothering him. He blames himself for not knowing the lawnmower man was the culprit back in 1995, when he first set eyes on him. (He must have missed this tiny visual clue.) And the official investigation has ruled out a Tuttle family connection, which we know to be real, the most concrete piece of evidence being the videotape and photos Rust found in Reverend Tuttle’s home.

Rust: We didn’t get ’em all.

Marty: And we’re not gonna get ’em all. That ain’t what kind of world it is. But we got ours.

Rust: I’m not supposed to be here.

We see a montage of the show’s haunted houses—the Childress home, the Ledoux home, the bayou, the cane fields where Dora Lange was found—now emptied of demons. And then we see Marty wheeling Rust out of the hospital. Technically Rust isn’t supposed to leave yet; he’s still in his Jesus-like hospital gown while Marty is dressed.

In his final trademark monologue, Rust explains what he meant by "I’m not supposed to be here." When he was dying, he explains, he had a moment of total darkness, and then was aware of something else: a warmer darkness beneath.

"And I knew," he says in tears, "I knew my daughter waited for me there. So clear. I could feel her. I could feel... I could feel a piece of my pop, too. It was like I was a part of everything that I ever loved, and we were all, the three of us, just fadin’ out. And all I had to do was let go. And I did. I said darkness, yeah yeah. And I disappeared. But I could still feel her love there, even more than before. There was nothing but that love... Then I woke up."

So this is what is at the heart of Rust Cohle after all. He’s not a nihilist. He’s a man who has been suppressing the deepest grief of his life, because he couldn’t locate the love he lost. And here’s where we realize that it isn’t the Dora Lange case that damaged these men. They were already broken. What happened in the past seventeen years was all leading up to this: the moment where they were finally able to take off their masks. To reconcile with their fathers and children. To remove their own knives. Strangely, through their descent to Carcosa, Marty and Rust have been healed.

In an effort to connect, Marty reminds Rust that he used to make up stories about the stars when he grew up in Alaska.

Rust: It’s just one story. The oldest.

Marty: What’s that?

Rust: Light versus dark.

Marty: Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.

Rust asks Marty to carry him to his car, out of the hospital, leaving his things behind. There’s that shot, of one man carrying the other. They’ve both saved each other’s lives. And here’s their final moment together:

Rust:You know, you’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.

Mary: How’s that?

Rust: Well, once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.

I love this ending, and would never in a million years have predicted that this is where True Detective would conclude: Rust optimistic and Marty humble, celebrating the appearance of one more light in the darkness. (Aside: partial credit for this dialogue may belong to graphic novelist Alan Moore, who wrote a story with a similar conclusion here.)

There are mysteries still left unanswered here. Who is the "Yellow King?" We didn’t learn the Childress man’s first name until the end (it’s Errol), and perhaps the Yellow King is a name for him, but I doubt it. The "Yellow King" could refer to the monument of bones in the fortress. But I think it’s probably a more abstract concept, the god who presides over Carcosa. And maybe there is some kind of cosmic power in Carcosa, because the premonitions they delivered to Rust were eerie. For example, here’s what Ledoux said to Rust right before Marty shot him: "It’s time, isn’t it? The black star. Black stars rise. I know what happens next. I saw you in my dream. You’re in Carcosa now, with me. He sees you. You’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle."

As for that recurring line, "death is not the end"—that literally came true for Marty and Rust, who somehow survived their wounds. Perhaps it also referred to the continuing of the Pagan traditions over generations. Everyone involved in the rituals seemed willing or eager to die in order to protect the secret, taking comfort in the idea that they would be elevated in the next life (a concept very close to the story "The Yellow King"), and that Carcosa would remain.

Also, why the public displays of Dora Lange and the Lake Charles girl? Most of the victims vanished without a trace. Why clue in the police? Is it something Errol Childress did of his own volition? Was it a warning to others? Or a sacrifice in the public square?

None of these questions, ultimately, are important, because this is less the story of a killer than it is the story of Hart and Cohle, two men who went through hell and back together and changed their entire philosophies in the process. I’d personally love to see a sequel in which those two shack up Odd Couple-style and make jokes about beating off to murder manuals, but I think this is where their story ends, and another detective story begins—because time is a flat circle. Thanks for sticking with these recaps, and we’ll see you again for True Detective II: Truer Detectives.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.